An Empirical Analysis Of The Impact Of Gaining And Losing Face On Impulse Buying

Face is very important to the Chinese social activities, also has a significant influence to the Chinese consumption, such as conspicuous consumption and status consumption. On the one hand, both gain and loss face will lead to the change of consumers’ emotion and brand preference. Most studies focus on the loss of face and few scholars have focused on whether gain face impacts on consumers. On the other hand, impulse buying is always the focus in the field of marketing research, scholars from the angels of the external cause and internal cause, cultural factors study impulse buying, but few scholars consider consumer impulse buying behavior from the perspective of face. The theme of this paper is to study the influence that gain face and lose face impact on impulse buying behavior.The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of gaining face and losing face impact on impulse buying, the mediating role of emotion on this relationship, and the moderating roles of face consciousness and self-esteem. Gaining face may bring pleasure and arousal emotion to consumer, leading impulse buying. Losing face may bring negative emotion to consumers. Consumers may buy impulsively in order to make up the inner. Now, impulse buying becomes a self-gifting behavior. Then, this paper investigates the moderating role of face consciousness. Consumers with high face consciousness may have more positive emotion when they gain face, and have more negative emotion when they lose face. Self-esteem may be a moderating role between the relationship of gaining face, losing face and impulse buying. Consumers with low self-esteem may have more impulse buying behavior when they gain or lose face.The data analysis results prove the part of hypothesizes. Gaining face and losing will lead to the change of consumer emotion, gaining face leads to positive emotions, losing face leads to negative emotions, but only gaining face can lead to impulse buying tendency, losing face has no effect on impulse buying. Face consciousness is the moderating role between emotion and face, higher the face consciousness, more positive emotions, when consumers gain their face. Self-esteem is proved to be a moderating role between gaining face and impulse buying tendency. After gaining face, consumers with low self-esteem than consumers with high self-esteem produce more positive emotions.Finally, this paper summarizes the theory and practice significance of the study, points out the limitations of this study and puts forward Suggestions for the future research direction and the way of sampling.